After Abuse, the Possibility of “A Better Man”

The filmmaker Attiya Khan, pictured during her teen years with a man identified in her new documentary only as Steve, who was violent toward her throughout their relationship.

A Better Man

The premise of “A Better Man,” a startling new documentary by the
Canadian first-time filmmaker Attiya Khan, is the reunion of Khan and
her ex-boyfriend, Steve. During the documentary’s seventy-three intense
minutes, they jointly exhume their disastrous two-year relationship as
teen-agers, when he violently abused her. Together, they visit a
domestic-violence counsellor, as well as the apartment they shared and
the high school they attended, spaces where Steve inflicted humiliation
and pain upon Khan. Simply looking at the buildings’ exterior façades
causes Khan to become nauseated and, in the Ottawan winter, flushed with
upset.

“A Better Man” nominally belongs to a certain set of interrogatory
documentaries in which an aggressor and a victim convene to reach some
sort of breakthrough: the itinerant child who makes peace with the
oppressive parent; the career racist who, upon looking into the saucer
eyes of the benevolent black man, renounces the activities of his clan.
The ethos of these documentaries is rooted in the idea that social
proximity might coax those inclined to dehumanize certain members of the
population into quick enlightenment. Sometimes, the results are less
than feel-good; the draw of “Angry, White and American,” a recent
program for which the black journalist Gary Younge interviewed the white
nationalist Richard Spencer, was, essentially, lurid juxtaposition. In
March, an Icelandic motivational speaker,* Thordis Elva, provoked
international outrage by collaborating on a book and a TED Talk tour
with Tom Stranger, the man who raped her when she was sixteen years old.
To many, the value of Elva’s pragmatism—that reconciliation may put to
flight the spiritual inertia brought upon a victim by trauma—was
undermined by the exculpatory glamour that the commercial tour lent to
Stranger.

No such glow illuminates Steve (he has kept his surname private, at
least for the time being), who onscreen is often palpably uncomfortable,
squirming, trembling, whimpering, whispering. Watching a conversation in
which Khan asks Steve, as he visibly turns pale, whether he remembers
throwing her on the ground in their flat and punching her, I felt a
vicarious satisfaction washing over me; as he answered yes, sounding and
looking small and timid, that satisfaction thinned to zero oxygen. But
“A Better Man,” despite its title, is not concerned with turning Steve
into a better version of himself. Instead, the film seeks to portray him
as he is, however agonizing his normalcy may be. More than once, Khan
presses him on the abuse that he may have endured before they started
living together, instinctively attempting to place him in some cycle of
violence; Steve vaguely confirms that there was trouble but does not
divulge specifics. The documentary’s cleverness is that it resists the
roundness of resolution or catharsis, while also acknowledging that Khan
and Steve will always remain some kind of asymmetrical unit.

A montage of weathered photographs of Khan and Steve, who met as
students in Ottawa when she was sixteen and he was seventeen, depicts
the two grinning, their cheeks pressed together. Khan, now forty-three,
has, except for the faint silver in her hair, barely changed; Steve’s
punk hair has been shorn, and now he wears glasses. After Khan ended the
relationship, the two repeatedly ran into each other in Toronto. During
one of these encounters, Steve apologized. This encouraged Khan, who
went on to work with people who have suffered domestic abuse and
assault, to float an opportunity to him, in 2013. It took six months for
Steve to agree to film both their conversations and their sessions with
Tod Augusta-Scott, a counsellor. In total, they spent eight days
together over the course of a year. Sarah Polley (the actress and
director of the documentary “Stories We Tell”) is the executive producer
of “A Better Man”; the cinematographer is Iris Ng; Khan co-directed the
film, along with Lawrence Jackman. That so many women are in charge of
the movie is all the more remarkable given that their storytelling has a
therapeutic dimension for Khan.

In her interactions with Steve, Khan mostly inhabits the professional
stance she has developed as an abuse counsellor. You can sense her
softening her voice, calculating what her body language should
communicate, measuring the physical distance between herself and Steve
as they sit, drive, and walk. The cadence of her questions resembles
that of Augusta-Scott, whom the two meet separately and together. “Do
you remember the frequency of the abuse?” Khan asks Steve in one of
their first sessions. They are sitting at a coffee table; Khan leans in.
Steve’s shoulders slump. “No,” he says, “I just know that it wasn’t
good.” Throughout their meetings, Khan recalls the minutiae of his
horrific assaults, as if the episodes are replaying before her, at one
point describing Steve throwing one of the few trinkets she owned
against a wall and then dragging her over its glass shards. Sometimes
Steve remembers, and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s not that he ever denies
Khan’s accounts; rather, the violence, for him, seems to have dissolved
into the churn of his volatile youth. This is the epistemological crisis
of abuse, in which the burden of knowing and remembering falls on
victim. Late in the film, Khan, in a voice-over, expresses anger at this
cruel imbalance: “How could you not remember abusing me every day in
that house? I needed you to be the one to say it.” Her question recalls
that crucial
“if”
that has qualified the recent public admissions of guilt from so many
powerful men—and those awkward codified phrases we have heard so often
of late: “my abuser,” “my rapist.”

At times, Khan’s agitation sneaks through. “I hate that one. I just hate
it,” she says to Augusta-Scott, about her memory of the time Steve put
her in a sleeper hold. You can hear Steve gulp when Augusta-Scott asks
if he remembers. (“I do now,” Steve answers.) At one moment, as we watch
Khan receive acupuncture, she tells us, again in voice-over, “You had a
thousand ways of saying how I deserved to be hit, spit on, made fun of,
because I was brown.” The charge of her words was familiar to me. Since
the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I’ve had what seems like hundreds of
conversations with black and brown people, who feel a suppressed rage at
the contours of the current reckoning. For hundreds of years, it was not
possible to rape a black woman, in a legal sense, because she was not,
legally, a woman; our national image of victims of assault, of victims
in general, is terminally white and female. Some feminist circles
tacitly argue that putting racial abuse on the same psychic plane as
physical abuse is a distraction; Khan articulates the seamlessness
between the two.

The framework of “A Better Man” perhaps owes less to those gimmicky
films that dramatize confrontations than to restorative justice, or R.J.
The approach has increasingly come up in conversation, as those outraged
at powerful men’s abuses realize that firings and cultural
expulsions—which remain, however momentous, exceedingly rare—constitute
a reaction more than a reparation. R.J. is an alternative to the
carceral approach, drawing from aspects of indigenous-community
practices in which victims, their communities, and wrongdoers together
decide what should be done to repair a harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s
critical essay “Mapping Origins,” from 1991, defines part of its appeal
for women of color, among whom there is “a more generalized community
ethic against public intervention, the product of a desire to create a
private world free from the diverse assaults on the public lives of
racially subordinated people.” But some critics of R.J. have argued that
“cheap justice” can embolden abusers: an empty show of remorse is how
some people retain their power. Khan recently told an interviewer that
she wasn’t familiar with restorative justice before she started to make
her documentary, which is careful to avoid advocacy—and part of the
strength of “A Better Man” is that its tone is both hopeful and dubious
about the potential of that model. Steve, for one, is uncommonly
welcoming to the prospect of being confronted and documented, but he
doesn’t seem to grasp that there might be something that these exchanges
could give to Khan. “I really just want you to be O.K., and I don’t know
where you are with that,” he says, in their last meeting. To call this
“healing” may overstate how trauma interrupts daily life; sometimes, we
just continue.

Perhaps the release of “A Better Man” would always have felt
coincidental. It has come out during a peak of awareness about the
prevalence of assaults against women, but that should not undermine the
fact that this film was, for Khan, the work of twenty years. Since her
relationship with Steve, she has grown older, found a partner, had a
son. These two people flit in and out of the documentary, reminders that
life goes on; one scene shows them giving out white ribbons, a display
of support for women who have been abused, to male shoppers at a grocery
store. The film concludes with a party. Khan commemorates July 20th, the
date she left Steve, every year, not as rebirth but as a testament. This
was her twenty-third celebration; the date now honors two
accomplishments.

*A previous version of this post misstated Thordis Elva’s nationality.